Wasted Food -- Jonathan Bloom on food waste and how it can be avoided | a look at how America squanders nearly half of its food

Cool Storage

Korean designer Jihyun Ryou’s food storage ideas are cool, but not cold. Her project Save Food From the Refrigerator aims to do just that.

Some of the point of this project is to get food to last longer–especially not have fresh foods dehydrate in the fridge. But her other objective is to honor traditional ways and access oral knowledge.

In both cases, the results thought-provoking, beautiful and–I’m guessing–effective!

image courtesy of Jihyun Ryou

image courtesy of Jihyun Ryou

image courtesy of Jihyun Ryou

June 4, 2012 | Posted in Household, Storage | Comments closed

Friday Buffet

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization continues to push waste reduction as part of the solution for our broken food system. Here, here!

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Rubies in the Rubble makes me wish I lived in London and I had more of a use for chutney. Cool stuff:

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Tattooing bananas. Looks fun, as long as they’re still eaten…

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Reducing food wasted at (business) meetings is an idea long overdue. Meeting Change has a post with some ideas on how to make it happen.

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What, your garden isn’t on wheels??

June 1, 2012 | Posted in Events, Farmers' Market, Food Recovery, Friday Buffet, Garden, International | Comments closed

Waste Awareness Down the Drain?

You know that one about the perfect being the enemy of the good? I’m not sure about the perfect’s relationship with the mediocre, but a recent Philadelphia campaign personifies that word.

Last week, the city unveiled a pilot program to install garbage disposals in 200 homes to reduce food waste going to landfills. Now–there’s some healthy debate on whether it’s better to send food to the landfill or down the drain. When there’s a waste-to-energy component to the wastewater treatment plant–as there is in Philly–the garbage disposal is the better option.

But…to undertake any kind of civic effort to “reduce food waste” (as the false Philadelphia Inquirer headline proclaims) through garbage disposals is folly. It keeps food out of the landfill–preventing methane emissions–but yields minimal energy creation. And operating those mammoth water treatment facilities takes plenty of energy, too.

And I shudder at the notion of brotherly-loving Philadelphians viewing putting food waste down the disposal as green behavior.

More important, if a city “Streets” department has the social and political will to undertake any kind of campaign on food waste, it’d seem that they could try a curbside composting pilot (or building an anaerobic digestion plant or a campaign to get people to reduce the amount of food they waste). As Philly Compost‘s president noted, the funding from InSinkErator is what’s enabling this program.

This all begs the question: Is the mediocre a good thing?

May 30, 2012 | Posted in Composting, Energy, Waste Stream | Comments closed

Friday Buffet

The uneaten food fee at buffets makes an appearance in NYC. It’s an interesting strategy, but can prompt overeating. The real solution–get rid of all you can eat.

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National Restaurant Association Show exhibitors donated enough food from their 4-day show to make nearly 42,000 meals. And something tells me the donated foods are top notch.

The NRA donations increased by 12 percent from last year, which is good because the Greater Chicago Food Depository said that they serve 77 percent more customers than they did four years ago.

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The Non-Consumer Advocate has a useful tip for transforming herbs from droopy to perky.

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Come on, Philly! You can do better than just encouraging people to send food waste down the drain. Waste-to-energy schemes at wastewater treatment plants aren’t nearly as efficient as composting or anaerobic digestion.

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Speaking of which…anaerobic digestion produces both energy and a useful soil amendment that can be used to help nourish football pitches soccer fields.

May 25, 2012 | Posted in Friday Buffet, Household, Restaurant, Waste Stream | Comments closed

Brand New Bycatch Bylaw

Last week, I touched on bycatch–fish caught unintentionally while trying for a different species–as a major source of seafood waste. One thing I neglected to mention is that quotas and regulations often make it difficult for fishermen to sell (or donate bycatch).

That’s why the new Oregon law allowing the use of what are currently called “waste fish” is so encouraging. It would allow fish caught accidentally to be processed and redistributed to food banks. It’s unclear just how it’ll work, but food processers will be allowed to sell some of the bycatch to offset their processing costs.

And, this being the Pacific Northwest…

In Oregon, bycatch is mostly salmon, caught while fishermen are fishing for whiting.

Hopefully, Oregon food banks will soon start reaping the benefit of this rule change, as healthy (local!) protein is often the hardest thing for non-profits to source. And if you’re looking for healthy, tasty protein, I’d say Oregon-caught salmon is right up there…

May 23, 2012 | Posted in Food Recovery | Comments closed

Big-time Bycatch

When it comes to food waste in the seafood industry, the key buzzword is bycatch. That term represents the creatures caught as a byproduct when fishing for another type of seafood.

And the numbers are shocking–as much as half of fish caught in the Europe are being thrown back into the ocean, dead. This bycatch occurs with a variety of methods, but fishing with large nets is the main culprit.

I’m at the Cooking For Solutions institute this week, and bycatch has come up quite a bit, most notably, in Callum Roberts talk. If it’s anything like his talk, Callum’s book, The Ocean of Life, will be a fascinating discussion of how we’ve degraded our oceans and what we can do better.

British chef/activist Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is also helping spread the word against fish waste. His Hugh’s Fish Fight campaign provides an avenue to take action against bycatch. Important stuff.

Given its significance, it’s a topic I wish I’d dealt with more in my book. But it is one that I’ll be paying closer attention to in the coming months.

May 18, 2012 | Posted in Environment | Comments closed

In Defense of Real Food

Here’s exhibit A on why I love farmers’ markets (and vegetable gardens). Where else is there a market for something as unique-looking as this?!

St. Paddy's Day bagel?

The conventional retail system has no use for this kind of cucumber. It’d never leave the farm. But–you’ll never believe it–this curvy cuke tasted a) like a regular cucumber and b) great.

Exhibit B:

C is for cucumber...good enough for me...

May 16, 2012 | Posted in Alphabet Produce, Farmers' Market, Personal | Comments closed

AntarctiCan You Believe How Far They Ship Waste?

What’s Antarctican food waste doing in Spokane? Why, it’s being burned, of course.

Apparently, life on Antarctica is like camping–pack it in, pack it out. Not being able to dig a hole (to build a landfill) and having to follow the Arctic Treaty, Antarctic researchers have to send all of their refuse elsewhere. Most everything is recycled, and then there’s the food waste.

The government contractor charged with this cleanup task, recently sent 300 tons of food waste all the way to an incinerator in Spokane, Wash. Sorry, I meant to say it goes to a (euphemism alert!) waste-to-energy facility.

It seems a bit odd to pay a whopping $165 per ton to burn food waste when composting or anaerobic digestion (true waste-to-energy) would be more economical and environmental. And did anyone even look into feeding food scraps to penguins??

But, if that were the case, that food waste wouldn’t get the chance to burn alongside confiscated drugs and other seized goods. So there’s that…

May 14, 2012 | Posted in Composting, Energy, Environment, Waste Stream | Comments closed

Friday Buffet

A Washington supermarket has an on-site contraption that converts food waste into liquid fertilizer. Organics alchemy, in action!
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The 42 million pounds of food that Forgotten Harvest will recover this year is…a lot. The most, actually.

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Piles of Indian wheat rotting by the side of the road? What a shame; what a disaster.

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On Wednesday, I posted a picture of a mysterious bit of produce. Some people guessed correctly that it was…a carrot! But a weird one at that.

It was actually a volunteer carrot that soldiered through the winter. I found it in the one neglected raised bed in my yard, the plant miraculously poking through a hole in a planter, which had apparently provided shelter from the freezing temperatures.

But honestly–it tasted really good! I had some raw and some mixed into an Asian stir-fry.
Now, the turnip that wintered in the same raised bed…that was less tasty. Some more pics, of the most mutated carrot I’ve ever seen.